The Trident
by bhut
Summary: So how did the battle of the Trident go down? Here's my take on it. Warning: this story contains Dothraki OC and giant otters. Also, not Rhaegar-friendly, as it is told from Robert P.O.V.


**The Trident**

_Disclaimer: almost all of the characters belong to Martin and co., except for my OCs._

_Across the multiverse…_

The morning dawned in a peculiar manner: a mix of sun and clouds, going down the sky in stripes. Between his Stormlands' birth and his life in the Arryn Eyrie, Robert was a good hand of reading the sky, and could tell that those were not storm clouds at all, they would provide some cover from the sun, but that was all.

"Ho, Robert! Slept well last night?" Ned Stark called out to him, as he approached Robert from his right.

"No," Robert replied curtly. "Tossed and turned half the night. So did you, or so I heard."

Benjen Stark, Ned's last surviving male relative, and currently – his squire, turned red. There were already rumors going around about Robert and Ned's supposed relationship, but nothing to their faces – Robert's war hammer and Ned's greatsword kept the worst of those rumors at bay, plus the men of the North and of the Vale didn't really believe them, whereas men of the Riverlands…

The men of the Riverlands so far did not make a good impression on Robert, and he was quite certain that the same went for Ned and his brother too. Yes, they assumed that they would need them to crush the bloody Targaryen ponce – pardon Robert, prince – across the Trident, but as the sun rose above the horizon, Robert was no longer so sure. Even without the Riverlands' men, their host wasn't outmatched by Rhaegar's – there were no Lannister banners to flutter alongside the Targaryen ones for the first time since Aegon the Conqueror's, for one thing, and while there were _Dorne's_ banners, none of them were those of the _house of Martell_ – it seemed that the kidnapping of Lyanna had hurt the Targaryen cause more than he and Ned and Jon had thought.

And now Ned was married to one Tully daughter and Jon to another, all because Hoster Tully decided to play Tywin Lannister or some similar crap, and they were saddled with his daughters as well as his forces. Robert has never cared for any of the Lions, especially Jaime 'the Young Lion', when the latter proclaimed that Lord Tully was trying to be Old Lion without the gold, but after meeting the man he had to admit that Hoster Tully himself was an easy man to dislike, and his daughters and son were too much like their late mother, who had been a Whent…

"Sers! Your Grace," a rider bearing Tully colours and Dothraki facial features approached them. "Lord Tully sent me to tell you that the battle formation is ready…and the Targaryen commander is coming halfway across the Trident to parlay!"

Robert glared down onto the speaker from his superior height, (and the superior height of his black horse. He was not the smallest of men, he knew it, yet atop his loyal steed he felt rather like a haystack on top of a mountain… yes, he was not big on allegories and metaphors, but this one rather got to the point, or so he felt). Bono was the leader of Tully's scouts, a Dothraki to match the one employed by Lannisters, Vargo Hoat or Goat or whoever; even the rest of the Riverlands men called Bono 'lousy' or 'mangy'… but always behind his back, and quite some distance off.

For his part, Robert did not like the Tully's trophy Dothraki – that man had a lean and hungry look, more like an animal's than a man's… but it was not about him, not now.

"To parlay, you say?" he rumbled, feeling rather dangerous himself. "I'll parlay, all right! Ned, are you with me?"

"Yes," Neddard nodded, on top of his own steed – a stallion of the North, smaller than Robert's big Stormlands beast, and of a pale reddish hue, with a mischievous look on its muzzle rather reminiscent of the Starks themselves… at least until the Harrenhall tourney and all that had followed after. "Robert, let's go. Benjen, you stay. If it goes wrong, you lead the men of the North."

"Ned!" Benjen protested, but the darned Dothraki did not know when to keep his mouth shut:

"Don't worry, young ser, it won't go wrong – there will be a battle, as His Grace wants," he lisped. "I was awake half the night, pray to the gods, and they replied. There will be a battle today – the clouds, their servants, are here, as are the murrain crows in the back, and the river wolves in the river!"

"Have you been chasing otters again, you- savage?" Robert heard Benjen mutter back to the other man.

"Young ser, otters are small and are afraid of crowds and are all brown, and live on their own. River wolves are bigger, and are half-white with spots, and hunt in packs, as the land wolves do, and they are not afraid of men, even of crowds, and they are not afraid of horses, especially in the water. They have gathered beyond the sight of man and horse. There will be battle…"

The loud clarion call of a herald's trumpet cut-off the Dothraki's nonsensical mumblings and for the first time since the bloody tourney Robert saw Rhaegar. The prince has not changed at all, though he was not wearing his tourney armor, his three-headed dragon helm, but was wearing a plainer, simpler plate.

He still had rubies on his breast, the ponce, as he had at the tourney, but Robert did not care about that, so his gaze slid past them at Rhaegar's sword, at his white steed. Both showed the typical Targaryen trademarks – the sword was Valyrian steel, long and sharp and thin to the point of delicacy; the steed was white and high-strung and delicate and prancing, to a point where it made Robert and Ned's horses look outright phlegmatic.

"Baratheon!" He cried even as he raised the faceplate of his helmet, "Stark! I see that you haven't desist in your foolishness still!"

"Rhaegar," both Stark's gaze and voice were lupine, sharp. "Where is my sister? Brandon's corpse, my father's ashes? Bring them to us, and then we can parlay."

"You dare to make demands?" Rhaegar continued to try to sound manly, but against Ned, he was like a cur puppy against an auroch. "The son of a father, who had lost fairly to our champion? A dirty traitor and a friend to traitors? A man who surrounds himself with savages from the Vale, and the Riverlands, and look, an even mangy Dothraki!"

There was a slight pause, as not even Robert and Ned could resist at glancing at the Dothraki in question, even as Benjen with the misguided helpfulness of youth, explained to the older man as to what the second most powerful man in Westeros, the Targaryen crown prince, has called him to his face.

For his part, Bono made a very convincing 'who, me?' facial impression, then turned to face the Targaryen parlaying party and made a very particular hand gesture, which in the Dothraki culture passes for 'you bugger your horses to death, you sexy beast' – or something to that effect; Robert wasn't up to date on his Dothraki hand gestures. Neither was Rhaegar, but judging by his face that had turned pomegranate red and his eyes that bulged out as if Robert was choking his neck already, he got the gist of it all the same. "Ser Jonothor!" he screeched loudly, possibly all the way to King's Landing.

The knight of the King's Guard in question charged, his sword in his arm already unsheathed. The Dothraki charged at the same time, with his own arakh ready… even as he whistled in a completely inhuman manner… and even more loudly than Rhaegar's shrill cry had been.

The two met in the river, their respective blades drawing sparks on contact. Once, they clashed, twice, on the third Bono dodged beneath his opponent's sword strike, (it missed him by a hair's width) and slammed the handle of his blade into his helm. Through sheer brute force alone the helmet split apart, and the King's Guard fell into the water, spitting his teeth and blood… and the water erupted, as the river wolves, giant cousins of the better-known otter, burst like their name sakes, their sharp teeth and strong jaws tearing at flesh and armor equally, dragging the man beneath the surface—

"Attack!" came the cry from both sides as knights, bannermen, men-at-arms just charged at each other…or fled, as it was in case of Dornishmen, even as Rhaegar and Robert clashed for their final reckoning, (Ned was forced away from them by the sheer force of the rush). Rhaegar was not _that_ bad of a knight, and his sword _was_ as sharp as it looked, and it was Valyrian steel: with his first strike he cut off one of the antlers' on Robert's helmet and cut it apart, stopping a hair's width away from Robert's head proper – but it didn't matter, as Robert's now-infamous war hammer, the Ram's Head, (named so because it was forged in a shape of a stylized ram's head) has made contact with the prince's breastplate.

An ordinary man – say, Jon Arryn – would need both hands to weird Ram's Head; Robert needed only one, but here and now he used both, and it showed: the pointy end of his war hammer shattered Rhaegar's breastplate, shattered, his rubies, and probably Rhaegar himself, though Robert reckoned that it was more of an impalement instead. Regardless, with Rhaegar dangling on Ram's Head in a manner of a butterfly on the end of a maester's pin, Robert swung his war hammer in another sweeping blow. Consequently, Rhaegar was flung from it and into the river, into the now swirling, bloody water and the now bloody, snapping jaws of the river wolves – the giant cousins of the otters. Rhaegar's cry was cut-off abruptly, just as abruptly as the about turn of the Dorne forces, mentioned above – and that was tipping point, as the remainder of the royalist forces, now broken and leaderless, just shattered and scattered to the four winds of the world.

The path to King's Landing was now open.


End file.
